Sweet Apocalypse: Sugar and Monstrosity at the End of the World

Chapter 2 juxtaposes the enjoyment in the monstrous with the violence inflicted on the individual body while showing how the tropes of speculative fiction reveal the ethno-racial. It offers a comparative analysis of representations of sugar production and consumption in Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992) and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011) to show how the commodity activates apocalyptic destruction in the text and to reveal intersecting histories of hemispheric violence. A comparative analysis reveals an otherwise unexplored thematic relationship between García’s post–Cold War novel and Whitehead’s post-9/11 text: depictions of sugar paint a picture of violence in the Caribbean as excessive and otherworldly, allowing us to read Dreaming in Cuban as a work of speculative fiction while reading Zone One as Afro-Caribbean.